Monday, May 26, 2014Exploradio: Microbeads and Lake Erie's floating plastic garbage patchInitial studies show that parts of Lake Erie contain the largest amounts of floating plastic pollution of any water body yet tested by scientistsby WKSU's JEFF ST. CLAIRThis story is part of a special series.

Reporter / HostJeff St. Clair

Lake Erie, as viewed from the Edgewater pier, looks clean enough. But beneath the surface Lake Erie holds the largest amounts of floating plastic particles among all the water bodies tested by scientists. SUNY researchers believe much of the microplastic pollution comes from facial scrubs.

The EPA estimates that Americans throw away more than 30 million tons of plastic each year. But not all of it ends up in a landfill or is recycled. New research shows that floating plastic is polluting large swaths of the world’s water bodies.

Plastic, plastic everywhere...Wind and waves churn the rocky shore of Edgewater Park near downtown Cleveland. It's a frequent haunt of Nancy Hughes, sustainability coordinator with Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, and one of the organizers of the Great Lake Erie boat float. Her job is to educate people about the perils of plastic pollution. She says, “You see all the plastic on the shoreline, you can’t miss it.”

Hughes reads from the list of top ten plastic items found on the beach by volunteers from the Alliance for the Great Lakes during a 2011 clean-up – “cigar tips, caps & lids, cigarette filters, containers, beverage containers, straws and stirrers, food wrappers, cups and utensils, cans, plastic bags, tampon applicators...” But what’s surprising researchers is not the piles of trash on Ohio’s beaches, but the prevalence of plastic out it the water that’s largely invisible.

Lake Erie's hidden plastic problem Last summer Sherri Mason, a chemistry professor from State University New York conducted the first ever survey of suspended plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. “We had one count that was around 450,000 pieces of plastic per sq. kilometer, and another count that was upwards of 600,000 pieces of plastic per sq. Kilometer.” Both were in eastern Lake Erie. Her results show that parts of Erie contain two to three times more pieces of floating plastic than scientist have seen in any other major body of water on earth.

Mason says she had expected to see broken fragments from plastic items left on the beach. “and instead we found a really high counts in our smallest category of plastics that are categorized as microplastics. Plastics that have a diameter from 1/3 mm up to 1 mm.“

She thinks many of these microplastics particles in Lake Erie have a common source - “While you can’t directly pinpoint they’re very similar to the microbeads that you find in many common consumer products.” In other words, facial scrubs that contain polyethylene beads as the exfoliant. “They have a very size, very similar chemical composition, similar texture to them.”

5 Gyres Institute studies Great Lakes pollutionMarcus Eriksen was part of Mason’s Lake Erie sampling crew. He’s also director of the 5 Gyres Institute. Eriksen has logged 40,000 miles sailing the oceans documenting the extent of plastic pollution trapped in five huge spirals, or ‘gyres’, including monitoring the well-publicized North Pacific garbage patch. Eriksen estimates that, "about 21% of the planet’s surface is covered in this soup, this thin soup of microplastic, heavily degraded plastic particles.”

Eriksen is concerned about plastic pollution from the Great Lakes heading into the Atlantic, and the damage microplastics can cause to Lake Erie’s ecosystem. He says these particles are so small, they’re round, "and they resemble fish eggs and these plastics may be being ingested by fish.”

Microbeads down the drain and into the Great LakesEriksen and Mason believe that microplastic beads in facial scrubs are making their way through wastewater treatment plants into the rivers and eventually the Great Lakes. Mason says 35 million people live in the Great Lakes water sheds and many live upstream.

“You’re not only getting the plastics from the people who surround Lake Erie, but you’re also getting all the plastics that flowed from Lake Superior and Lake Huron into Lake Erie, so you have this kind of additive or accumulative effect.”

Sherri Mason is heading back out to Lake Erie next month to continue sampling the water for floating plastic particles. Her team is also studying whether these plastics concentrate pollutants and how these toxins leach out into fish. Part of her funding comes from the Burning River Foundation in Cleveland.

It's high time that we seriously restrict, tax and stop superfluous use of plastics--drinking straws (not necessary), plastic eating utensils (avoid or must recycle), bags for every little purchase (ask if OK not to be given a bag, or use one's own cloth or recycled bag).Posted by: Dorothy Lepp (Akron, OH) on April 29, 2013 11:04AM

I agree. I would go one step further, make all plastic biodegradable. It's a shame to pollute our beautiful waterways with all this horrible garbage.

We also need to recycle more plastic. All plastic should be recylable, and if people could get pay-back as they do with aluminum cans, that might be more of an incentive to recycle. Plus stop the disposable diapers!!!Posted by: Renee (Montana) on April 29, 2013 1:04AM